Retractions in journals of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM)

The objective of this study was to explore the nature of retraction notices associated with so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) focused journals. Data related to retractions in SCAM journals were extracted from the Retraction Watch Database for the period 2000-2025.

The analysis found that there were 902 notices associated with 42 SCAM journals. Overall, the percentage of retractions relative to all papers published in the named journals is low (<1%) however a single journal was responsible for 84% of retractions. The majority of these retractions occurred in 2023 as the result of a wider publisher investigation into paper mills and sham peer-review. Similar to other studies, retraction was rarely due to a single cause but reflected a mix of data integrity concerns, peer-review issues, evidence of plagiarism and other issues. The average time between original publication and retraction was 19 months (mode 10 months) with 98% of publications having multiple authors. The main country of origin of authors of retracted works were China, India and South Korea.

The authors concluded that published peer-reviewed literature is used in a range of ways, as the foundation for future studies, incorporated in systematic reviews, clinical decision-making and in training of practitioners and clinicians. While this study has demonstrated that retractions in the complementary and alternative medicine literature is generally at a lower level, any evidence of publication integrity breach is a concern and should be cause for ongoing monitoring.

The way I see it, there are several problems with this study and its conclusion.

1. Do we know that SCAM journals are as willing to retract papers as are other journals? The answer, I am afraid, is NO!

2. Retraction Watch compiles retractions by monitoring publisher websites, publisher metadata, and community tips, but not all publishers report or label retractions consistently. In other words,

Retraction Watch relies on a mix of automated checks and manual curation, but it still can’t catch every retraction, especially from smaller or inconsistent sources. This means that we have no evidence that retractions from SCAM journals were fairly represented in the sample investigated in this study.
In view of this, the conclusions need to be re-formulated, I fear:

In the sample analysed for the present survey, retractions in the SCAM literature might be at a lower level than in the non-SCAM literature. This observation could be due to more than one phenomenon and requires independent replication.